How an iPhone app called 'Secret' could become the next cyberbullying scandal

There's an old philosophical experiment called the Ring of Gyges which considers how people would behave if they didn’t fear the consequences of their actions. If you had a ring that made you invisible, would you obey the normal rules of society, or would you spy and steal for your own gain and amusement?

Perhaps fortunately, nobody has invented the Ring of Gyges, so we don’t have an answer. But the latest iPhone app taking a generation of millennials by storm is becoming the social media equivalent. It’s called Secret, and it could easily become the internet’s next cyberbullying scandal.

Secret is quite simple. Users post Twitter-esque status updates to their network of phone contacts, which other people can then reply to. The catch is, Secret is anonymous – you can see posts, but you don’t know who they are from. It’s like reading through someone’s diary while oblivious as to whose it is.

The app is becoming the hottest new social network among American high school pupils (Facebook has been gathering dust for years). It is only out in North America at the moment, but a similar one called Whisper is available over here, and is climbing the download charts.

Flicking through people’s status updates on the apps feels mildly voyeuristic, and is undeniably addictive. But the rise of anonymous social networks is bound to set alarm bells ringing very soon.

In the last few years, social media has been following a clear trajectory towards combining online and real identities. In the early days of the web, nobody used their real names; people communicated on message boards using pseudonyms. The nearest anyone got to revealing their identity was if their moniker was a combination of initials and year-of-birth: JT1989. Then came Facebook, which required people to use their real name. Now, the idea of an “offline” and “online” identity seems to have vanished.

This is generally a good thing. Compared to the Wild West of internet message boards in the 1990s and early 2000s, insults and abuse are relatively rare on social media. People are easily identified, and so face a public backlash, bans and even legal action for cyberbullying.

Secret and Whisper, however, have slipped the Ring of Gyges back on. As people have realised the dangers of oversharing on Facebook on Twitter, the demand for internet anonymity has returned, and people are returning to the message board days. Even Mark Zuckerberg – previously a champion of combining online and offline identities – has acknowledged this. He told Businessweek last month: “If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.”

If anonymity is going to return to the mainstream, it would be nice to believe that online abuse isn’t going to return with it, but the combination of people posting about sensitive personal issues and others replying to them incognito seems like a fertile breeding ground for trolls.

Don’t believe me? A similar app, PostSecret, was shut down by its founder just two years ago due to people submitting abusive content. The issues surrounding Secret, in particular, are potentially much greater than those of PostSecret – since posts are shown to a user’s network of phone contacts, the confessions are from those in one’s social circle. In many cases, it won't take much to figure out who certain posts are from, and people are going to be unwittingly “outed” against their will.

I don’t want to be a social media scaremonger – there are far too many of those around and the paranoia is often way over the top – but it’s hard to see the rise of anonymous social networking ending well.